LATEST POSTS:
- Responding to Adam Curtis’ “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
- Howl’s Moving Capital in the 21st Century.
- Burnout and The People I Met At Work.
- Exploring Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of the Ethical.
- Thoughts on “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.”
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Responding to Adam Curtis’ “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
NOTE: I only finished watching this film series last night, and I intend to watch it again. As such, I reserve the right to come back and rethink this essay if I need to. You’ll probably get the most out of this essay if you’ve already watched it, but it is intended to also be…
Howl’s Moving Capital in the 21st Century.
Last night I watched a pair of films with my girlfriend, and they got me thinking about all the different ways we can approach the world, and the contents thereof. Usually on this website what I talk about links in with Heidegger, and I suppose these ideas will as well. The first film was Howl’s…
Burnout and The People I Met At Work.
Note: I want this post to land in a caring way, and not an angry way. But maybe angry needs people to care. I think it would be fair to say that I am currently in the deepest portion of the empathy burnout spectrum that I have previously here-to-fore inhabited. Maybe that’s why I’m considering…
Exploring Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of the Ethical.
Note: While I intend this piece to be readable for those who haven’t also read Fear and Trembling, I suspect that this piece will be a lot more valuable to those who are interested in the text itself, which can be found in loads of places on the internet, but also at least here. A…
Thoughts on “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.”
I recently watched this fantastic 1969 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, directed by Alain Resnais and written by the exceptional Marguerite Duras. I’d also recommend the film to anyone who likes a classic, or who has an interest in things that are beautiful. I thought I might say a few things about it. Also, Hubert Dreyfus…
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Summary and Notes.
NOTE (22/02/2021): I would encourage anyone interested in criticisms of individualism/consumerism to look into Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head. I think it aims to explicitly address some of the problems of depressive hedonia Fisher worried about. You can also read my discussion of Curtis’ work. I recently read Mark Fisher’s fantastic…
Some Ways Meditation Has Been Affective for Me.
In this piece, I’ll recount the experience I’ve had with practicing contemplation or meditation, or whatever you want to call it, and the way it effected my personal and professional lives. Update (29/05/2020): It’s worth noting that I don’t take meditation very seriously these days. At the minute, I’m questioning a lot of things. That…
Status Consumption and the Costly Signalling Treamill.
I’m not sure when it will be sensible to end the measures we’re currently taking to kerb the spread of coronavirus. It is by a long-shot not my field. But I do think this is an opportunity for us to reconsider the course that society is currently taking. Some of my more climate conscious friends…
Against the Computer Model of the Mind: Can We Reduce All Properties to Quantities?
I. Strong and Weak Representationalism Despite Western thought’s persistence to the effect, there are nevertheless reasons to doubt the idea that the mind comes in contact with the world through the mediation of a representation. For that matter, there are also good reasons to doubt the idea that the mind is in some way separate…
Etymologies, and the Basic Idea of Embodied Cognition.
One time, I read this fascinating book titled ‘Metaphors We Live By’ by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. It was recommended to me by a good buddy– who mostly guides my intellectual development by his whims, and who coincidentally suggested the title of this blog. The central thesis of this book is what I guess…
Dreyfus on Heidegger No. 4 and 5; also, The Conclusion to This Series for The Moment.
This is going to be my last set of notes on Dreyfus’ lectures for two reasons. The first is that as I go, I’m becoming really vividly aware of how little of this I get, and the second is that I’m not convinced these pieces are going to be accessible enough to be worth putting…
Dreyfus on Heidegger No. 2 and 3; also, Schizophrenia and Addiction as Loss of Contact.
In this post I’m going to cover what I took away from Dreyfus’ second and third lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time. It’s worth noting that a lot of the material he covers in these lectures is prompted by questions from the audience, and so it gets a little bit circuitous. The following notes are…
Dreyfus on Heidegger No.1; also, Thoughts on Ecological Perception and Self-Image.
In my sort of quest to understand Heidegger, I’ve been looking for a suitable lecture series. The reason he’s such a live figure to me is that he figures substantially in Peterson’s lectures on personality, specifically in the borrowed notion that Human Being is an essentially purposive being: human being is oriented being for a…
Why Heidegger is So Hard to Understand.
I. I’ve been spending the last few weeks working through Heidegger’s Being and Time. It’s fascinating, but also super difficult to understand. One of the reasons it’s so difficult to understand is that Heidegger insists on inventing specialist terminology. I really understand the motivation behind it, which is that language can often obfuscate the truth…
Live Optionality, and The Wealth that Matters.
Previously, I’ve written about what happens when you don’t have anything to believe in, and how poverty can deteriorate into something much deeper and more torturous than just a a lack of money. But I think there’s also something to prompt the deterioration more than just not having enough money as such. I think purpose…
Beware the Optimization-Effiency Constraint! Also: A Hope for Freedom.
I. Here are some ideas to play with: that culture affects thought through language; that culture can be impressed and enforced in relation to some incentives; that culture is incentivized to impress certain modes of thinking, speaking and being in order to reinforce its own position. These are all sort of standard moves if we’re…
For the People I’ve Known Without Parents.
It seems so unfair that the world could be organized in such a way that someone could take you away from the place you came from. It’s more unfair that this could be seen as the best option. I want to argue with that idea, but I don’t have the background to make a case…
Eight Brief Remarks on Phenomena.
Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis agree on a very important point: that something appears means it must be. This is understood in terms of relevance. Or otherwise, I suppose your neurosis is best ignored, hm?To be is not different than to be relevant. It cannot go another way. There is no doubt. This was Descartes’ characteristic fuckery:…
Resource List!
Just to let you all know, I’ve started compiling lectures/webites/books/etc that I find useful/beautiful/meaningful in a page just off to the side. I figured I’d make a post here to direct attention to it for anyone who uses an RSS feed, etc. I hope it’s useful for someone. Nos.
Writing Exercises for Self Inquiry.
In previous pieces, drawing on the work of John Vervake and Ian McGilchrist, I’ve discussed the importance of reciprocal processing and participatory experience in enabling insight, wisdom, and implicitly, eudaimonic well being. For the most part, those pieces were theory-oriented. Now let’s talk about applying the theory in practice. These practices are not my own…
The Internet of Agape.
I. The Obverse of Mook Manor. It’s really easy to get down about the state of collective discourse on the internet. It’s easy to think that the only consequence of our increased inter-connection is an increased capacity to be ass-holes to each other. That’s true. I’m pretty sure the internet has a polarizing effect on…
Tango as Spiritual Practice: Bringing Together Heaven and Earth.
Also on Medium. In previous pieces ‘Statement of Purpose for The Modern Spiritual Seeker’ and ‘Critiquing the ‘All Incense’ Approach to Spirituality’, I started to build up an account of spirituality that requires practice, structure, and the willingness to radically discard structure in order to acquire wisdom. While this piece is intended to make sense…
On Domicide and Homelessness.
I. I’ve never rough slept, though I’ve had plenty of friends who were rough sleeping at one point or another. For the most part, they were the types you would least expect to need to. Two of them were one time students at Cambridge. Sometimes I laugh a little bit internally whenever I hear anyone…
The World is A Dream, And it All Comes for Free.
Expectancy bias is real, and it shapes your reality. This means in some sense that what you expect is what you get. When I was a kid, I used to stand on my head so I could see what the world looked like upside-down. To look at the world from that perspective transfigured it. My…
NOSIARCH 